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I've done both. In my previous startup (circa 2005) we started at The Planet (are they still around?) and within 18 months we were colocating physical servers a

by jmathai 13y ago

I've done both. In my previous startup (circa 2005) we started at The Planet (are they still around?) and within 18 months we were colocating physical servers at a nearby Level 3. I'm sure it's gotten better but when we colocated I had to project what type of traffic and storage (photos) we'd need. That led us to lease a few servers from HP. We were able to reuse hardware we owned already for reporting type tasks. But I got 1TB storage servers when we were using about 1/5 of that. In my current startup (photos, again) we were on AWS from the beginning. I think we could save money now if we wanted. But when we first started out all we needed were 2 micro instances and S3. I'd say we've increased capacity by 8x since then. But here's the kicker. Since we started on AWS we were able to keep our costs fairly low at the beginning and as we grew we never had to make any long term projections. We simply added capacity (literally) on a weekly basis. Once you start to buy into the AWS ecosystem you begin to reap some serious benefits. You simply cannot think of AWS as just EC2 instances. Of course, the trade-off by going all in is some level of lock-in (though this can easily be minimized). Having done both I am happy to pay AWS more for the ecosystem. -- We're using EC2, ELB, SNS, ElasticTranscoder, RDS, S3, Route53, CloudSearch, CloudFront & Glacier.

Negitivefrags 13y ago
But here's the kicker. Since we started on AWS we were able to keep our costs fairly low at the beginning and as we grew we never had to make any long term projections. We simply added capacity (literally) on a weekly basis. The exact same thing can be said for renting dedicated servers. You can add new ones at any time and it's fairly quick. This is exactly how we scaled up as well. Adding new servers day to day as required. Yes, it takes 4 hours rather than 4 minutes but unless you are dynamically scaling up and down throughout the day in direct response to load, you are not using the versatility that you are paying for with AWS. Few people are. Once you start to buy into the AWS ecosystem you begin to reap some serious benefits. You simply cannot think of AWS as just EC2 instances. Of course, the trade-off by going all in is some level of lock-in (though this can easily be minimized). And there is nothing stopping you using these other cloud services without EC2. If you look around at other vendors, you might even be surprised at the prices you can get. For example, we worked out at one point that in our case CloudFront would cost over over $50,000 per month for what we were paying about $4000 per month with a different CDN.
- jmathai 13y ago
  It's entirely feasible that things are much better than they were a decade ago. I sure hope they are :). Perhaps it's slightly more expensive to start with AWS, cheaper as you scale (WRT man hours) and gets (prohibitively) more expensive once you hit a certain scale. I don't doubt there are plenty of reasons to be off AWS. Lots of evidence exists to support that. And vice versa.
jsmthrowaway 13y ago
ThePlanet was purchased by Softlayer, who was then purchased by IBM last summer. So they're now IBM.

by jmathai 13y ago

Negitivefrags 13y ago

But here's the kicker. Since we started on AWS we were able to keep our costs fairly low at the beginning and as we grew we never had to make any long term projections. We simply added capacity (literally) on a weekly basis. The exact same thing can be said for renting dedicated servers. You can add new ones at any time and it's fairly quick. This is exactly how we scaled up as well. Adding new servers day to day as required. Yes, it takes 4 hours rather than 4 minutes but unless you are dynamically scaling up and down throughout the day in direct response to load, you are not using the versatility that you are paying for with AWS. Few people are. Once you start to buy into the AWS ecosystem you begin to reap some serious benefits. You simply cannot think of AWS as just EC2 instances. Of course, the trade-off by going all in is some level of lock-in (though this can easily be minimized). And there is nothing stopping you using these other cloud services without EC2. If you look around at other vendors, you might even be surprised at the prices you can get. For example, we worked out at one point that in our case CloudFront would cost over over $50,000 per month for what we were paying about $4000 per month with a different CDN.

jmathai 13y ago
It's entirely feasible that things are much better than they were a decade ago. I sure hope they are :). Perhaps it's slightly more expensive to start with AWS, cheaper as you scale (WRT man hours) and gets (prohibitively) more expensive once you hit a certain scale. I don't doubt there are plenty of reasons to be off AWS. Lots of evidence exists to support that. And vice versa.

jsmthrowaway 13y ago

ThePlanet was purchased by Softlayer, who was then purchased by IBM last summer. So they're now IBM.